Cisco (News - Alert) has announced the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) project has selected commercial off-the-shelf technology from its next-generation data center portfolio. The company will make use of Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Cisco Nexus Data Center Series Switches in creating this revolutionary new radio telescope in Western Australia.

Cisco has attained considerable leadership in the data center space and also provides 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking. The MWA correlator will put together and process the large volumes of raw radio signals, which will be analyzed by radio astronomy experts. 

Since Cisco UCS offers features such as high performance and scalability, it will help MWA researchers in getting valuable insights into handling big data. According Cisco, this ability will help them to get scientific insight and knowledge.

“With our long-term involvement with the SKA project, Cisco is proud to be supporting the MWA. With the aim of demonstrating how an industry standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf approach can support the ICT elements of the MWA, we are particularly excited to have the Cisco UCS data centre platform be adopted to support leading-edge research in Australia," said Ken Boal, managing director of Cisco Enterprise and Public Sector, in a statement.

Recently, SENAI, the Brazilian National Service for Industrial Training, in Santa Catarina selected Cisco VXI (Virtualization Experience Infrastructure). SENAI got rid of the limitations of a conventional PC environment with Cisco's solution. Prior to its virtualization initiative, three of the SENAI/ SC selected branches had IT atmospheres with 300 computers. The company has also stated that each of these computers had different configurations. This needed IT to maintain a large number of operating system images at once.

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